HP has recently unveiled Project Moonshot – a green datacenter initiative that is intended to reduce datacenter energy use by up to 89% through the sharing of storage, networking, management, power and cooling systems across thousands of servers.

According to a recent article in the Financial Times, high taxes and uncertainty about carbon reduction regulations are making IT companies reluctant to build datacentres in the UK – just as cloud computing is dramatically taking off.

Specifically, the UK’s carbon reduction commitment came into force last year and forces large energy users such as banks, datacentres and supermarkets to pay a levy that is based upon the amount of carbon they use. The new levy is expected to generate approximately £1 billion in revenue for the government and could cause energy costs for datacentres to rise by 10%.

However, the main complaint from datacentres is not the increased costs but the frequent changes the UK government makes to carbon reduction regulations along with the relative lack of acknowledgement of the savings that they have already generated. And while big centralized datacentres are more efficient than several smaller ones, bigger datacentres will use more energy and fall under the government’s carbon reduction scheme. Hence, there is little incentive for companies to pool IT resources into bigger and more efficient datacentres.

Moreover and in a recent Data Centre Risk Index report from global real estate services firm Cushman & Wakefield, the UK ranked fifth globally on a list of 20 desirable locations for datacentres. And while a fifth place ranking is not that bad, the report also warned that high tax, energy and labour costs in the UK could prompt some companies to look elsewhere to build their datacentres or relocate existing ones in order to reduce their overheads.

Nevertheless, it’s worth noting that the Datacentre Knowledge recently reported that Digital Realty Trust has just paid £12.9 million ($21 million) for a 130,000 square foot datacentre facility in Chessington, England – approximately 17 miles southwest of central London. However, the Financial Times article also quoted Adam Levine, the vice-president for European sales at Digital Realty Trust, as saying that the UK is making it more challenging for datacentre operators to do business in the country.